Not since Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath has there been a family saga as powerful as Bucking the Sun, nor a family as compellingly strife-torn as the one at its center. Driven by drought from their Montana farm to "relief work" building the Fort Peck Dam, the Duff family spans the extremes of the times, from the eldest son Owen, who has made his way through college to an engineer's job on the dam, to young Bruce, his antithesis, a risk-taker who works as a diver setting pilings into the treacherous river bottom. In between are Neil, the quiet one, and the brothers' iron-willed wives. When a couple of wild cards are introduced in the form of a Red Uncle from Scotland and the prostitute he takes up with, the plot gets as thick and turbulent as the muddy Missouri.
Bucking the Sun is a startling story of mixed fortunes that races from moment to moment, an epic rendering of time and place that reminds us why Ivan Doig is our foremost living storyteller of the American West.
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“Doig’s real achievement is to chronicle—with empathy and precise, lyrical authority, down to the last load of gravel hauled in a sturdy Ford truck—the magnificent Fort Peck project and the desperate times out of which it arose.”
— Kirkus Reviews
“Bucking the Sun is one of those books that take you over as you read it, invading your daydreams, lodging its cadences in your brain, summoning you back to the page.”
— Washington Post“The milieu is colorful and the characters as Patton impersonates them, distinctive.”
— AudioFile“This richly detailed narrative offers comedy, passion, and adventure.”
— Library JournalBe the first to write a review about this audiobook!
Ivan Doig (1939–2015) wrote over a dozen books, including the Indiebound bestseller Work Song, the classic memoir This House of Sky, and the acclaimed Montana trilogy. He has been a National Book Award finalist and has received the Wallace Stegner Award, among many other honors.
Will Patton is an award-winning actor and narrator. HIs narrations have earned the prestigious Audie Award for Best Fiction Narration and also won dozens of AudioFile Earphones Awards. His numerous film credits include Remember the Titans, The Punisher, The Mothman Prophesies, Armageddon, and The Spitfire Grill. He starred in the TNT miniseries Into the West and on the CBS series The Agency and won Obie Awards in the theater for his performances in Fool for Love and What Did He See.